Editorial: Palm trees and other shady endeavors
Someone once posed the question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”
The Sun poses a similar question: If the city attorney says there’s a signed agreement for the ill-fated Bridge Street palm tree planting project but nobody has seen it, does the agreement really exist?
In early April, the Bradenton Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) that includes the mayor and city commissioners approved planting 80 coconut palm trees along Bridge Street. According to City Attorney Ricinda Perry, the CRA was to contribute $40,000 toward the project and developer Shawn Kaleta and/or one of his LLCs would kick in another $10,000.
Perry told the CRA members there would be a signed maintenance, indemnification and hold harmless agreement in place before the trees were planted. The trees were planted in late April with no signed agreement in place.
A couple of weeks ago, one of the new palms toppled onto a Bridge Street sidewalk and had to be replanted.
Last week, FDOT told the city to remove the new palms planted in the Gulf Drive-Bridge Street roundabout.
Gulf Drive is a state road and FDOT doesn’t allow coconut palms to be planted along state-owned roads because they limit visibility and contain large falling objects like coconuts and palm fronds.
You’d think someone with the city or the city’s often-contracted landscaper would have known about this pesky little state rule – or at least checked to see if there was such a pesky little state rule. But that kind of foresight doesn’t mesh with the city’s “You can do it right when you do it over” approach to project management.
So now we know that coconut palms aren’t cool along a state road but they’re still OK standing alongside the highly-traveled, highly-populated city-owned Bridge Street.
To date, Perry and the city have not provided The Sun with a copy of the signed agreement, despite the multiple public records requests made during a two-week period. Perry told us we had to wait until the city clerk returns from her vacation on May 28 before we can see the elusive signed document.
The Florida Public Records Act says the city has to promptly acknowledge public records requests, respond in good faith and make “reasonable efforts” to figure out who has the requested document and where it’s stashed. City officials who break the state law can be fined $500 or removed from office if they try really hard to hide or withhold the requested document.
Perry and Mayor John Chappie were copied on our multiple and still ongoing requests for a signed agreement. Perry gave us an incomplete and unsigned draft version of the agreement that didn’t mention the project partner’s name. She also sent us some emails that showed us how hard she tried to collaborate with Team Kaleta’s lawyers to make this deal happen.
According to the unsigned version of the agreement, Team Kaleta is supposed to maintain the palm trees at their expense for the next 30 years. The unsigned agreement doesn’t specifically mention coconuts or palm fronds and it doesn’t specifically require Team Kaleta to pluck those pesky buggers from the trees before they drop on some unlucky person’s head, child or 1962 Corvette.
The unsigned agreement does however require Team Kaleta to comply with reference Exhibit A – a blank space that calls for a yet-to-be-seen site plan that shows specifically where each new tree was planted – and Exhibit B: “Guidelines for the Management of Coconut Palms.”
The “Guidelines” inform us that coconut palms can grow to be over 100 feet tall, may live 100 years and “regularly shed coconuts and large fronds, which may expose people and property to injury and damage.”
The all-knowing ‘Guidelines” also say, “To minimize this risk, coconuts and fronds must be regularly removed prior to their fall. In certain instances, coconut palms may possess structural defects that increase the risk of failure of a portion or all of the palm.”
Thank you, wise city leaders. What could go wrong?
The “Guidelines” say any coconut palms that show serious defects, conditions or weather damage must be removed (by Team Kaleta) within 14 days of being told to do so. Given that one tree already toppled onto a Bridge Street sidewalk on a sunny day, what’s the over/under on how many palms are going down during our upcoming “more active than usual” hurricane season?
In the absence of the signed agreement, it appears the first tree likely fell before the agreement was signed and dated by Chappie and Team Kaleta. If that first falling tree injured a person, place or thing with no signed agreement yet in place, who would have been liable – the city, Kaleta or both?
The unsigned agreement is also supposed to indemnify (lawyer-speak for “protect”) the city and the CRA against any future liabilities and lawsuits associated with the troublesome palm trees. If someone or something gets clocked by a falling tree, frond or coconut, that unfortunate soul gets to do battle with Team Kaleta’s army of lawyers, while the city sits on the sideline screaming, “Leave us alone, we’re indemnified!”
Mayor Chappie frequently laments the negative impacts that super-sized short-term vacation rental homes, aka “party houses,” have on Bradenton Beach’s residential neighborhoods, but he’s OK taking project money from the Island’s biggest developer of “party houses.”
Instead of sharpening their pencils and wisely managing CRA and city funds for future projects, the mayor and city commissioners are taking the lazy and easy way out by enabling Perry to pursue funding partnerships with Team Kaleta.
In the past year or so, Perry proposed the CRA or city partner with Team Kaleta to improve the city-owned parking lot near the Team Kaleta-owned marina. She also suggested the city partner with Team Kaleta for a Team Kaleta-controlled mooring field near the pier.
In early April – the same day she proposed the ill-advised, poorly-executed palm tree project – Perry proposed the CRA partner with Team Kaleta to install a waterfront pedestrian path that runs from Team Kaleta’s marina, past Team Kaleta’s mobile home park and ends at the city-owned pier.
Who is Perry working for? The city or Team Kaleta? When proposing these public-private partnerships, she sings the praises of a developer good-hearted enough to help fund CRA and city projects, but what she, the mayor and the city commission are really doing is selling the city down the Intracoastal Waterway.
Somehow, the sister cities of Anna Maria and Holmes Beach manage to fund their capital projects without financial aid from Team Kaleta. And in both those cities, the city attorneys focus on the basics – providing legal advice and legal services to their respective city leaders and city staff.
In most cities, a city attorney’s sole job is to dispense legal knowledge. City attorneys don’t usually serve as de facto city managers, project managers and project initiators. But in Perry’s defense, she’s just filling the leadership void created by Bradenton Beach’s weak mayor form of city government, and the weak mayor and weak commission gladly let her do it.
With the threat of state-imposed consolidation looming over the three AMI cities, there’s chatter in local political circles that Chappie wants to serve as the Island-wide mayor if that happens. That leadership scenario might scare some folks, but Island Mayor Chappie and Island Attorney Perry could then partner with Team Kaleta to plant coconut palms and other seeds of dissent throughout the rest of the consolidation fiefdom.
